Biting the hand of Project Fear

Gordie Broon, the popular expert on popularity

Gordie Broon has been intervening again. Gordie’s always intervening in something or other, possibly in atonement for the fact he could never be arsed to intervene in the affairs of his own constituency when he was MP for Kirkcaldy. The Labour party is currently at such a low ebb that it’s been reduced to taking lectures from Gordie on how to be popular and attractive to voters like he was an expert on popularity and getting people to vote for him. That’s a bit like having Margaret Thatcher lecture you on the importance of empathy and compassion in the social security system, or asking Rolf Harris to share the benefits of his wisdom on child protection.

Project Fear mark 2 is now in full swing. The election of a man who embodies the values of palaeo-Labour, the way the party was before dinosaurs like Gordie evolved, will be a cataclysm of epic proportions. Birds will fall from the skies. There will be plagues of frogs and locusts. The Queen will warn people to think very carefully and won’t be purring at all. And no one will be allowed to use the pound. People who support Jeremy Corbyn on social media are being condemned in the pages of the papers like Scottish independence supporters – that’s just how evil they are. How dare ordinary people engage with politics. It should be the preserve of the professionals. For the rest of us, just don’t dare imagine that political life is possible without the parasites.

Anyway, Gordie did his usual pacing up and down thing, giving a very good impression of a man who was chewing a rug. He never stands still when giving a speech as a subconscious reflection of his fear of ever being pinned down. It’s always difficult to watch Gordie in full flow, as in the average person he provokes the same sensation of creepy revulsion you get when watching a hauf cut university professor deliver a lecture with a urine stain spreading down his trousers. You’re repelled, but at the same time fascinated to see if he can get to the end without falling over. Gordie didn’t manage to get to the end of his time as prime minister without falling over, but he’s the only recent former prime minister who isn’t associated in the public mind with war crimes or child abuse so he counts as a success story for the British establishment.

Gordie didn’t fall over this time, sadly. Waving his arms about, he gave a thunderous speech warning of the dire terrors that would befall the Labour party if it succumbs to socialism and left wingery. He pledged that if Labour members vote for anyone but Jezza, Gordie will personally guarantee that whoever does win the leadership will deliver all their policy speeches via the medium of a Keir Hardie glove puppet. It’s the nearest thing possible to socialism in the modern Labour party.

According to Gordie that Labour party needs to be credible if it is ever to get elected again. This statement would be a bit more credible if it didn’t come out of Gordie’s gob. No one believes a word the man says. We remember his vow that he was personally going to guarantee, and then he buggered off under some rock. The only thing Gordie is guaranteed is that he’ll get fawning coverage on BBC Scotland, the last remaining bastion of true believers in the Cult of Gordon.

As he paced about, the thrust of his argument was that Labour risked becoming a party of protest, and wouldn’t be able to help the poor and vulnerable unless it gets into power. Unfortunately for this thesis, when Labour was in power under Gordie and his predecessor it didn’t do a whole lot to help the poor and vulnerable. Instead it presided over a regime of lax banking regulation, being terribly relaxed about the very wealthy getting very wealthier, and getting the public sector tied up in expensive contracts with private finance companies which we’ll be paying off for decades to come. Now the man who promised there would be no return to boom and bust is telling us that Labour needs to be credible. Gordie and Blair boom and bust the Labour party’s credibility.

What the Labour establishment and the mainstream media don’t get, can’t grasp, is that Jeremy Corbyn is popular precisely because he is universally condemned by the mainstream media and the Labour establishment. When you are condemned and derided by discredited individuals and organisations it only increases your credibility. You don’t start to believe again because someone you have already decided is a serial liar tells you to. In Gordie’s own words as he angrily rounded on Tony Blair after Blair had backed down on what Gordie thought was a commitment to stand down in Gordie’s favour – “There is nothing that you could say to me now that I could ever believe.” Now every time he opens his mouth, an entire population thinks the same way.

Every time Jeremy Corbyn is criticised by someone like Broon or Blair, another pile of votes add up in his favour. If people you hate hate someone, you’re more disposed to give that person a fair listening. That’s simple basic human psychology. The more that the careerists, the place-persons, the greasy pole climbers, the automatons and the plastic politicos line up to condemn him, the stronger he becomes.

And as they do so they are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. The usual suspects are complaining about infighting, as they fight like ferrets in the proverbial sack. They say that Labour will become unelectable if Jeremy Corbyn wins, and if he wins they’ll do their utmost to undermine him, to plot against him. The Labour right and the Labour establishment will do all it can to wrest power back from the party members, and they’ll destroy Labour in the process so that they can stand back and say – see we told you so. The losers will be those in England who believe in progressive politics, and in Scotland the final demise of Labour as a credible political force will only hasten the end of the Union.

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28 comments on “Gordie Broon, the popular expert on popularity”

Bang on as usual! The more the likes of B-Liar and Broon tell us NOT to support Jeremy Corbyn – the more people get doon aff the fence and decide to put their number one beside his name. England & Wales badly need a Labour Party headed by someone like JC, if only to join forces with the SNP and provide an effective and credible Opposition to Scameron, Gideon and Herr Drunken Schitt! Jeremy is the last hope for the poor, sick, disabled, elderly and generally vulnerable population outside Sctoland. And the more B-Liar and Broon hate him – the better they will love him!!

Spot on. Wish somebody would take the gold-plated key away from whoever it is in the BBC tasked with constantly rewinding him. Whoever it is could probably be employed to do a similar job on Big Ben, which at least is fairly accurate in its tolling.

Brown a tractor and a half to Scotland, that man will be presenting a massive expenses bill for that dud of a speech and then he will vanish out of the UK again, just so he will not have to explain what happened to the VOW.

You would have to be a complete thicko to believe a word that swine says, and it would be a miracle if that quizmaster was ever held to account on live TV for all the lies he stated during the referendum campaign.

Davy, this is not a personal attack as I’m not just speaking you you; I’m talking to myself and others too here, and using your post as a jumping-off point. If I do come across as insulting, I apologise in advance.

Using words like ‘tractor’ and ‘quizmaster’ to get round word filters may have seemed like an amusing approach at one point but that time has passed. I’ve seen your posts, you’re clearly an intelligent person, so can we all agree to phrase things a bit differently from now on? If the other side want to continue to fling veiled (or sometimes not-so-veiled) insults, let them. We must show that we are above such things and that we stand for values much purer than any of them could ever understand.

The big beast must be knackered after all that pacing and the cameraman is in A&E suffering from whiplash.

Of all the bullshit Brown has come away with, that rambling incoherent filibuster takes the biscuit. In a nutshell, apparently no other party or movement is capable of progressive, caring politics other than Labour and any action in pursuit of electability is justifiable. FFS!

Outstandingly patronising, arrogant and delusional guff, all in one overly long, historically selective and rambling rant.

Hopefully a last intervention from one of the few remaining dinosaurs.

Been busy this afternoon, doing the washing and ironing, seems I was better employed cause I missed Mr Broon, no relation. I nearly wept for Ms Cooper when I heard he was backing her, then I remembered what an unpleasant lot she and her Husband were.
You think he could do the decent thing and stay in LA, I will bribe my friend there to show him around though I doubt I can offer her enough.

Hope he well skelps his Blairite clones opponents in the leadership contest.

Trust he sets the imminent rUK’s Labour Party on fire with their – some might assert – socialist, first, founding principles.

Forgive me, but a dubious assertion at best as John MacLean long ago explained.

For example, they have been subject to right wing infiltration from their inception, To wit, the Fabians pre-figuring the Blairites and Broonistas.

Gub them – the clones – I hope he does resoundingly. However, he had better get rapidly up to speed regarding Scotland and its citizenry for we are sovereign, and his fiats do not run here.

Meantime and this aside for the fleeting moment, I trust Mr Corbyn will be at the forefront of the rumping of the deadwood parasites that currently infest the leadership of the imperial, British Labour Party.

The establishment are running scared because Corbyn is threatening to make a real difference and actually work for the people. They always ramp up the scaremongering when they are threatened. People are waking up to how much they are actually manipulated.

Corbyn’s policies follow the suggestions of Stiglitz (Nobel laureate economist; firmer chief economist at World Bank) and Krugman (also Nobel prize economist), so they’re obviously crackpot. And if he persists like SNP did in questioning the wisdom of austerity, he invites similar electoral catastrophe. Labour, You Have Been Warned.

The good thing is, Scotland is shot of Broony. Last year he would have been boring the pants off an audience somewhere in Fife, on behalf of the BBC.
Now he surfaces in London, his REAL home.
Thing is, no matter who wins, Labour will split into incompatable factions like the Trotskyists and Maoists of yesteryear.
Corbyne could be good for Labour to find its soul again, but he won’t gain any traction in the face of the Blairite cultists led by the likes of McTernan.
A workers Party which contains few workers (Miliband’s top brass was reputed to be unable to find one person living on the minimum wage) was always doomed. Keir Hardie would have despaired at this bunch of hucksters.

Broon is as up to his neck in Iraq as the rest of Blair’s cabinet. The point however is that he’s not primarily associated with it. We have a whole list of other things to blame Broon for before we get to Iraq.

An excellent summary of the career of the man who “saved the world”. The man is, like his pal Bliar, a liar and a charlatan and also like his pal Bliar, and the rest of Bliar’s cabinet, a war criminal. The lot of them should be on trial at the Hague and be hanged for their war crimes which resulted the the deaths of nearly a million innocent civilians, including men, women and children.

Incidentally your description of Broon, ” giving a very good impression of a man who was chewing a rug” is priceless.

As I said elsewhere, it seems like the very thought of (Not) Labour once again having some Socialist credentials is causing the party hierarchy to implode and commit seppuku, bringing the whole party down with them.

I really hope Corbyn wins – progressive politics needs it. Yes, it will probably split his party in two but if out of that comes a credible progressive movement then that has to be welcomed. After all we’re stuck with being part of the UK for at least another 5 years by the sounds of it.

There are a whole raft of credible descriptive labels which can be pinned onto the individuals that constitute the right wing of the Labour Party and their mouthpieces. Unintelligent is not one of them.

The gist of the argument they are presenting is that only their ideas are workable and credible and only their ideas alone can win an election in 2020. The key idea here being on the economy. The whole thrust of the argument against what Corbyn stands for is centered around rubbishing economic ideas like People’s Quantative Easing (PQE ), as proposed by people like Richard Murphy, and painting a picture of Corbyn and his supporters as trapped in a Statist era which has long gone past its sell by date. Ergo, there is no credible way that anyone standing on any platform that is different or alternate to neo liberal free market Capitalism can ever get elected in the Westminster Union.

The idea that those who presided over the expansion of PFI, the sell off of public and council assets, the deregulation of banking and finance, the institutionalisation of moral hazard in bailing out a failed ideology with public money which we will be paying back for generations, not to mention an illegal and cowardly war, have any credibility to lecture anyone on electability is simply laughable.

Even the oxygen breathers in the finance houses and billionaire capitalists expect banks to be run as State utilities and the surplus funds currently sitting unproductively on balance sheets to be reallocated to achieve a reversal of the unsustainable inequalities that have marred the past three decades of the failed economic model that Brown, Blair, Kendal, Cooper, et al are claiming as the only credible model that can win an election.

And this is where the unintelligent label begins to fall apart. Because there is a far stronger issue than the economy and economic policy which will turn off the electorate. And these people, not being unintelligent, know this. It is democracy. They have made it crystal clear that if Corbyn wins they will immediately seek to oust him. And in that event they also know full well that this will send an unequivocal message to the electorate of these islands that these people cannot be trusted with democracy. Any act of undermining a Corbyn leadership will render Labour unelectable. No voter with half a brain cell will touch them with a barge pole.

And the relevant point is these people know this to be the case. They will never admit it. But even saying it out loud in the way they have has hung an albatross around the neck of the Party whoever wins the leadership election. What this tells us is that these people would rather have that outcome of making he Labour Party unelectable for generations on the grounds that it cannot be trusted with democracy than let any alternative ideas and policies to the failed neo liberalism they stand as gatekeepers to protect back into the body politic.

Corbyn is a decent bloke. If he wins this contest then he needs to get rid of these albatrosses and dinosaurs otherwise they will scheme to undermine the alternative he stands for because they would rather Labour continually lose than see the demise of their faith based zealotry. Their psyche could not endure such an event.

That is why you have people like Blair and now Brown foaming at the mouth, rambling across and from the stage pulpit like a born again evangelist trying to hold the line. It’s was sad. It’s was pathetic. And the BBC were cruel to transmit this – both to Brown and his fellow travellers who exposed themselves as little more than deluded itinerants drunk on the political equivalent of industrial turps, and the public forced to endure this spectacle which was akin to a fairground freak show.

Very well put Dave, but “Corbyn is a decent bloke”. Well, I don’t know the guy, but his spoken attitude towards Scottish independence means I couldn’t care less, both about him, and the remnants of a once fine political party, which has now long gone.

Broon did make one truthful comment, perhaps only one. He did end boom and bust. Now all we are left with is bust, with the only boom being the sound of the Labour party self destructing.

As for Corbyn, I see no difficulty in seeing him through the prism of his views on devolution and independence. Sure, lets work with him at Westminster if he’s elected, where our objectives coincide, but let’s not forget that he’s against what we want, more powers and, eventually, independence. In that sense, he is a Unionist.